Monday, October 03, 2011

Various Artists - A Gentle Introduction, Mixed by Renick Bell

Various Artists - A Gentle Introduction, Mixed by Renick Bell is a 'sampler' of the type of music you'll find at the3rd2nd. Renick wrote: "Sometimes I want to introduce people in a general way to what we are doing at the3rd2nd.com. I have never been able to comfortably say “listen to this one thing we put out, and then you will understand what we are about.” Jason and I talked about doing some mixes of the material on the site, and I think that is just what we have needed to demonstrate in a broad way where we have been. This mix is intended to be the beginning of a series of mixes presenting panoramas of the music here.

This mix remains not-quite-representative of our releases. I've deliberately chosen some of the sweeter, kinder tracks, though the audience might not find it exactly sweet or kind. Still, these tracks show all of us experimenting and improvising with electronic music in our studios with sounds which are, relative to other noises we make, gentle. Drones, glitches, noise, lots of instruments, and long hours with microphones and in front of computers are condensed into 64 minutes of what I think may be, for some, our more approachable side.

All of the tracks, with the exception of “Seed Study 05”, can be found in their original form on this site. The mix includes tracks from a majority of the releases on this site. Please download them as well to see how they fit into their respective releases.

This is a studio mix done in Ardour on a Linux computer, not a live one, but I've mostly avoided messing with the contents of the tracks themselves. I tried to mix and layer them in a way that I felt would take a listener on a journey which builds to some intensity and moves into a wide open space. It feels to me that we are concerned with transformations, so I wanted to let one track transform into the next one smoothly and naturally.

It also became clear to me when doing this mix that we are largely into making numbered sequences, right down to the name of our site. As our collective name implies changing the sequence, I hope this resequenced mix of some of our releases will serve as a gentle introduction, inviting listeners into the other works on this site.